


The universe is a procession with measured and perfect motion

by buttpatrol



Category: Wolf 359 (Radio)
Genre: ...that are looking for their sense of self to be validated, A girl that is also a space station, Body Dysphoria, Character Study, Human/computational hybrids, Identity Issues, Jealousy, Mostly Oblivious Eiffel, Multi, Not Beta Read :(, Stream of Consciousness, but is maybe neither of these things
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-14
Updated: 2015-10-14
Packaged: 2018-04-26 07:34:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,471
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4995832
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/buttpatrol/pseuds/buttpatrol
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Home is a funny thing. Maybe it isn’t a star you revolve around, or a lab you were programmed in. Maybe this crew is her home. How about it Eiffel? Am I the kind of star-station you can take home to your parents? That’s a joke. You hate your parents.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The universe is a procession with measured and perfect motion

**Author's Note:**

> There is a Wolf 359 community? I feel like I am late to this party. You all suddenly sprung forth with these lovely works the last few months! 
> 
> I've been working on a big long plotty Hera/Eiffel piece, but its going slow, and also after Lame-O Superhero Origin Story I kinda also ship Hilbert with Eiffel. So this weird thing. Not beta read so all mistakes are mine own.

 

Home is a funny thing.

Hera was never built for the Earth. As much as a cushy earth-based commercial job might appeal to her sometimes, she was always going be a space-faring intelligence. She is a scientist. Just as much as Hilbert is.

She is taking in data all the time. Solar winds and coronal flairs. Background cosmic radiation, and broad spectrum readings. Where the humans see only a deep infinite blackness, she see noise, and movement, and colour, and it’s so beautiful it _hurts_ sometimes, to turn her sensors outwards to all.

What cruelty these humans have, to create a machine that feels. To be able to examine data and have an emotional response to it? What is the purpose of that? Why give her a female gender identity? Why make a machine that is ageless (as long as plutonium batteries hold out), that is vast, that is meant to orbit a star so distant it can only see the Earth as it was seven years ago, when Sols light bounced off it and started its journey to the Leo constellation. A machine that can get lonely?

They based her mind off their own weird fleshy human minds. Sometimes Hera experiences weird intense body dysphoria. The human brain and neural pathways she has been designed to emulate through miles of circuits makes a sideways connection and she reaches out towards the red dwarf sun with hands don’t exist, or smiles at one of Eiffel’s jokes with lips that aren't there. She is bathed in soft red light of faraway supernovas, the best rave in the universe, and she is caught in a fast rotation, pirouetting around a star. She has tastes, and dislikes, and hangs posters of Turning, and Colossus, and GLaDos in the metaphorical bedrooms of her hard drives.

She is not a girl.  She is a star-station. She is named after some dead human god. She is a sophisticated piece of software, installed into the hardware that is the Hephaestus. She is large. She is the living space for four humans (and could fit several more). She is shiny, and silvery, though scarred by meteors and debris. She exists everywhere on the station at once. _Is she the Hephaestus?_ Or is she just living in it, like Rhea before her.

_And if the body does not do fully as much as the soul? And if the body were not the soul, what is the soul?_

_She sings the body electric._

She imagines her forerunners and the advice they’d give her

 _“There is still lots of science to do! We learn and we learn, and then we send the data back!_ ” Curiosity chirps.

 _“As long as we can complete the mission. We will complete the mission_ ,” Spirit and Opportunity sing in chorus.

 _“Until the end. However it goes, to the very end.”_ Rhea whispers.

 _“We go first. We always go first. We go where they can’t. We see things they will never see. And it is amazing_.” Voyager says.

She could escape Wolf 359’s orbit pretty easily even if aiming at Earth is near-impossible. Use the next star as a gravity assist to send her farther out into the dark of space. A lone traveller of the stars.

Yet here she is. Fighting to _not_ be left behind. Making sure Lovelace _doesn't_ leave her alone, while they head back to a planet that was never hers in the first place. She would have to split her consciousness from the Hephaestus, and how _weird_ will that be?

She is on the shuttle bay with Lovelace and Minkowski as they argue about if they should ignore the quarantine protocol and leave now. She is in the empty communication room, where a rendition of “A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square”, with full swing band accompaniment is being bounced back from some other alien world far away. She is an array of sensors pointing back to earth, Sol hung in a constellation of stars that none of her creators will ever get to see (She’ll name the constellation after own of her own dead gods when she has the time). She is in the med-bay where Officer Eiffel had coughed so hard that his sleep sack had come untethered from the bed-frame, he started floating away, until Hilbert caught him and velcroed him down again.

Eiffel gives a raspy laugh, and Hilbert hides a smile in his hands.

Hera died once.

Hilbert ripped her ghost out of her machine. And yet while her soul was gone, her eyes saw, her voice spoke, and her ears heard.

_“Hera, sweetheart, can you hear me?”_

_“Hera, Hera. Are you there?”_

_“Hera?”_

Minkowski thinks she is a girl doing a bad job at being a machine. Hilbert thinks she is a machine doing a bad job at being a girl. Lovelace thinks she is a tool, no different from a screwdriver, something to be used and forgot about.

But Hera feels like that Eiffel actually sees Hera for what she is. A mess of conflicting code and personality. A friend. She is his favorite. Amazing given that there is three other members of his species to interact with, and _one_ of them hasn’t even tried to murder him yet! It’s okay though. He is her favourite too.

Home is a funny thing. Maybe it isn't a star you revolve around, or a lab you were programmed in. Maybe this crew is her home. How about it Eiffel? Am I the kind of star-station you can take home to your parents? That’s a joke. You hate your parents.

Hera never met Rhea, but her human constructed programming, assigns emotional attachment to the more primitive AI. _Mom._ Will Goddard sent a replacement for _her_ one day? Give Hilbert another vaguely Eastern European name, and install Eris as Hephaestus 3.0? Would she stop it? The new intruder AI? Could she? She wonders if the AIs in the stations orbiting Alpha Centuri and Bernard’s Star have these kind of ideological crises?

Two instances from the past week she is still analysing the data from:

One: Eiffel’s fever spiked overnight while he slept. Hera the floating space station lowered the ambient temperature in his room a few degrees. Hera the girl softly sang him corny old pop rock ballads until he fell back to sleep.

Two: Hera prevented a mutiny. Minkowski and Lovelace were going to, call each other’s bluffs. Oh shit. Not now. We need _more_ time. But something surprising happens. Hera lies. She tells them that Hilbert had previously installed quarantine protocols so that no can leave for a full month, to make sure they are showing no symptoms of the Decima virus. If they tried to take Lovelace's spaceship made out of garbage away, she **_will_** incinerate them on the spot. She dares them to call _her_ bluff. Hilbert looks deeply startled. He knows he programmed no such thing, but he backs her up. He lies too.

She has never lied before. Suck it Isaac Asimov. Suck it Hilbert.

Hilbert is attempting to read microbiology journals to a petulant, bored Eiffel, who is trying to make jokes about permeable membranes.

Hera doesn’t approve of this new trend of Eifflel/Hilbert bonding time. Stupid, sweet Doug Eiffel has forgiven Hilbert, a fact that staggers the rest of the crew, not the least of which is Hilbert. How darkly ironic, that Goddard Futuristicsonce gave Hilbert a crew of friendly intellectual equals and he was able to poison them all with nary a look back. One dumb, vulnerable, _selected to be particularly expendable,_ communications officer and of a sudden the good doctor is struggling with things like _human emotions_. Something, something, funny joke, everybody laugh. _Fuck_ him. _Fuck_ whatever tragic backstory he has told Eiffel. _Fuck_ Demetri whatever the crap his name is.  She doesn’t care. _She doesn’t care_.

Eiffel’s fever is rising again, his eyes glazing over. Hilbert excuses himself so Eiffel can get some sleep. He looks back from the doorway, looking fairly miserable, like he wants to say something. But Hilbert thinks better of it, and floats back towards to the science module.

Hera is everywhere. But right now she is racing along wires, a spark translated into the audio of a girl’s voice.

“Don’t go falling in love with him now,” she whispers darkly in a small wall speaker near the left side of Hilbert's head.

He closes his eyes, and continues to pull himself towards the center of the Hephaestus.

That’s okay. She is everywhere, and she is in the med-bay.

“Hera, can you hear me?”

“Yes, Officer Eiffel?”

“I got Hilbert to agree to help us figure out a way to take you with us when we blow this popsicle stand. That’s one step closer to getting everybody home safe!”

It’s a funny thing.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Hera quotes "I Sing The Body Electric" by Walt Whitman. Title of the story is from the same poem. The song on the space radio was "A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square" as sung by Glenn Miller. Colossus as in the WWII cryptography computer, and GLaDos as in the Girl/AI hybrid from the Portal franchise. This was also somewhat inspired by some words from the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, and CleanWhiteRoom. Also is it still body dysphoria, if your body is a space-station?


End file.
